David was trying to translate some documents that he had scanned into his computer.

David was trying to translate some documents that he had scanned into his computer.

Q. Richard, you’ve helped me out once before and I wonder if you would have a look at another problem I have.  Is it possible to translate documents I have scanned into Picasa using Google translate.  I use the browse option to select the document but Google then responds that the document is not in a format it recognizes.  If Google translate is not appropriate, is there another freebie program I can use.

A. Hi David, it sounds like you have added the documents to Picasa as scanned .jpg files, if I’m right then this means that they are simply pictures to your computer (and to Google) and therefore are not easily translatable (without specialist OCR – Optical Character Recognition – software).  You have a number of options, the first is to buy some OCR software, this software will “read” the scanned image and convert it into an editable document in a format that Google translate can deal with.  Google translate will translate files in the following formats…

AdWords Editor Archive (.aea)
HTML
Plain text (.txt)
Microsoft Word (.doc)
Rich-text (.rtf)
Open Office (.odt)
Wikipedia™
knol

…so you will need OCR software that will convert scanned images into one of these formats.  Alternatively you can type the  document direct into Google translate and let it do the translation from there.  If you have a search around Amazon you will find plenty of OCR software options available for purchase, I can recommend Abbyy Fine Reader and PaperPort having used them myself.